THE HUMAN GENOME:
POEMS ON THE BOOK OF LIFE
GILLIAN K FERGUSON
![Brief romp through the
relationship of poetry and
science, now largely, and
sadly, estranged (contd.)
How shall we sing of such things
How shall we sing of such things; complexities,
numbers - such fixed, immutable, polished laws,
that will not admit the heart, will vanish the soul;
lay waste the state of wonder, emotional fevers -
obliterate eternal spirit from its frail house of skin.
How shall we hang these stars back in the sky -
now sparkling imprisoned on a parchment map;
from black sockets plucked, shivering like fish,
to twinkle in silver ink, named like dogs, slaves.
Earth has become servant of static Mistress Sun;
Moon, Queen of Night, has borrowed all her light;
her lunatics and wolves are duped - her hoot-owls
confused. Mountains pull back their layered skins -
stone veils for stories written in slow stratum bones;
global journeys across impermanent, primaeval seas.
How shall we understand the coloured heart of light,
tell people how it crowns with gold the autumn tree,
to fill them with the fruit of peace. That snowflakes,
seeming ermine, tender, are, to fact, crystalline, hard;
a gentle white touch as heals a broken world, illusion.
How shall we sing of these measured things, paint such
exacting lines - dissect the shining spectrum; Heavenly
hue of kingfisher’s wing. Nay, prove the Angel’s wing
they whisper is deluded Man in borrowed wings shorn;
a carnival freak - while we shout Icarus, at proud fools.
‘The later nineteenth century, represented in England by the Victorian Age, was one of immense scientific and technological advances. The poets, although they had inherited much of the legacy of Romanticism, lacked, on the whole, the Romantic capacity of vision. In this peroid, poetry was striving to come to terms with an age whose ideals seemed to conflict with it. The one strand of the conflict is represented in Victorian poems of science as technology. In an interesting sonnet, Charles Tennyson Turner, Alfred’s brother, identifies science with technology, as does George Meredith only slightly later. Turner sees no danger from science-technology, but only progress. Like Blake, however, Merediwh understands that an abuse of technology can destroy and calls on science to be an ‘olive branch’ and bring peace. Meredith’s The Olive Branch, is so diffuse and general that it is hard to know whether he is rejecting some forms of industrial machinery, plants, or techonological aspirations. His ambiguity is at least of historical interest, given the specific rejection by some twenthieth-century poets of modern military uses of science – conventional, nuclear and biochemical.’ Poems of Science, Eds John Heath-Stubbs, Phillips Salman, Penguin, 1984
If I am a poor uneducated child, the stars still shine
If I am a poor uneducated child, the stars still shine;
I do not have to be Astronomer Royal to understand
harmonious, calamitous events up there to the degree
of wondering more, yet simultaneously enjoy notions
of a Hunter, Seven Sisters, Ploughs and mighty swords;
of night lamps of God - wishes twinkling - shimmering
abodes of dead family, eyes of night; because however
poor, I thus become rich and richer, at no cost; all gain.
And if I am a poor uneducated child with stars still shining -
need not choose to lose the lure of such bright legends, tales,
when man or book reveals to me, shivering skeletons beneath
Imagination’s cloak - under the Universe’s complicated skin -
for still I see the worth of brilliant pictures - creative charm
of fleshing out the gleaming beauty of these stripped bones;
delightful to the sense and growth of any mind - in learning,
quite fit for scientist and king, as any wondering little child;
for any man who cares in looking up, up, to dream among the stars
he prickles with his fingers; the poor uneducated child that was me.
‘In every one of us, there is a living process of combustion going on very similar to that of a candle… it is not merely true in the poetical sense….Thus you see that the analogy between respiration and combustion is rendered still more beautiful and striking. Indeed, all I can say to you…is to express a wish that you may, in your generation, be fit to compare to a candle; that you may, like it, shine as lights to those about you; that, in all your actions, you may justify the beauty of the taper by making your deeds honourable and effectual in the discharge of your duty to your fellow men.’ Michael Faraday, A Course of Six Lectures on the Chemical history of the Candle, 1861
‘In later years, [Einstein’s] appearance and personality - the thistledown hair-do, the sad chimpanzee face, the pacifism, the simple tastes – gave the west its paramount symbol of benevolent scientific genius.’ Faber Book of Science, 2005
‘Relativity theory created shock-waves in literature and the visual arts as well as in popular thought...Poetic equivalents to relativity theory were at best vague, however, for lines of verse do not move ‘relative to the observer at speeds approaching that of light’.’ Peter Carey, Editor, Faber Book of Science, 2005
The poet walked so many miles
The poet walked so many miles, holding his lantern held high,
fuelled by words’ particular light - speaking, painting, singing;
wiring high discovery to wise heart, filtering for consequence,
remembering his brothers - animals at his feet - until the maps
made no sense; hieroglyphs, foreign tongues, specialists only
understanding codes, signs; mechanistic, clinical connection -
the poet with his messy bundle of organic connection, emotion,
mystery and love, was turned back, signs appearing on the path:
‘No Trespassers, Poets or Deities’, like those who believe
they own the land, very earth; power to grow food, flowers.
He walked in circles, wandering only with himself for company,
as too subjective subject, until we knew the spirals on his fingers,
creases on his belly individually by name, hairs on his little toe,
about sex with his last five girlfriends - (or lack of it, and them);
but nothing understandable of life in a test tube, rivers of Mars -
death of lunged forests; implications of spiral embroidery, DNA.
‘Various versions of natural change had woven in and out for centuries. ‘Transmutation’ was not a new idea; it had been explored in the early 19th C by French scientists such as Jean-Baptise Lamarck and Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and, long before them, in literary texts such as Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene in the late sixteenth century. And metamorphosis, with its sideways motion, had always been a familiar imaginative resource since Ovid and Apuleius.’ Gillian Beer, Introduction to Charles Darwin Origin of Species, 1859, Oxford University Press, 1998
‘The evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin and the discoveries which the geologist Lyell made concerning the antiquity of the earth showed man to be, perhaps, only a latecomer among many species doomed to extinction. All this seemed to call into question not only the accuracy of Scripture and the literal interpretation of its account of Creation, but the very existence of a God and of a Divine Providence. As in so much else, Tennyson is representative of his age in his persistent grappling with these problems. Browning, a more intellectual poet, was, suprisingly, not very directly concerned with scientific ideas. But his ‘Epistle of Karshish’ dramatizes the debate between science and revelation in terms of an imaginary Arab physic of the first century AD brought face to face with the miraculous…By the closing decades of the century, Darwinian ideas of evolution seemed to many to have won the day. In Swinburne’s Hertha, the poet imagines a kind of vitalist force in nature in relation to which man himself is only a transient phenomenon.’ Poems of Science, Eds John Heath-Stubbs, Phillips Salman, Penguin, 1984
‘Are God and Nature then at strife/ That Nature lends such evil dreams?/ So careful of the type she seems,/ So careless of the single life.’ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, 1850
Science has stolen more than its due
Science has smothered the emotions - Passion’s red flames
died in cruel, cold, clinical dissection of a dead man’s heart;
light of wonder extinguished in a Latin map of stars,
diamonds snuffed in chemical composition of coal -
flowers’ natural beauty withers on a laboratory slab –
my love will know the family of her lilies; how nose
deducts a bloom’s white sugar - airborne as sluggish bee
who does not knows he cannot fly, so impertinently does.
How much greater the boundless world, imagination;
how much more than broken coloured shafts is light -
Sun’s generous effulgence, her pouring bounty; she sparks
the hearts of men by laying hands upon his skin and eyes -
how much better understood by silent spirit, speechless soul,
than barren arcane calculation on a secretive, scribbled page.
Science comes not as a child of God, infant with much to learn,
nor yet as brother to the mind of men who have explained Him
from the written script of men, but as conquering Philistine,
who cannot see this Rose beyond her hinged red chemicals,
held in space by petal shapes, fed by the sprung green fuse;
who spills her bloody beauty at their feet like wasted pearls.
Science has stolen more than its due – Dictator! Monster!
How she has raped the earth of all its charms; goddesses
and nymphs - personifications, solid dreams - good creatures
of Imagination; enriching, enticing, clothed in ancient stories,
happy under the encompassing eyes of God - abundant Nature,
or that particular understanding of God who is both; how silent
the glade, singing river without their laughter, presence, song -
how Science has drained magic from the world, so mercilessly,
asking only for its shining composition; as diamond perhaps,
crystals of a snowflake heart? Can we see or touch, observe?
No, then it cannot be, does not exist; is, indeed, impossible –
what dour reasoning; such arid calculation, even angels fled.
‘To the end, Mendeleeff [Mendeleyev] clung to scientific speculations. He published an attempt towards a chemical conception of the ether. He tried to solve the mystery of this intangible something which was believed to pervade the whole universe. To him ether was material, belonged to the zero Group of Elements, and consisted of particles a million times smaller than the atoms of hydrogen.’ Bernard Jaffe, Crucibles, 1930
‘The members of the same group of elements stand to each other in the same relation as the extremeties of one or more octaves in music.’ John Newlands, paper to the English Chemical society, 1864
‘…Hardy was able to represent those who grasped the theory of evolution, accepted it, and made some accommodation with it…Both he and Tennyson indicate a new phase in the history of poetry’s response to science. It is an interesting phase because Darwin’s work, although rigorous, is not couched in symbols inaccessible to poetry. Quite the reverse, in fact, since it deals with the various classes of animals, including man, and is represented in prose that can lend itself to imagery. Darwi’s working, in fact, can be thought of as replacing that of the Great Chain of Being. We have, as in Swinburne’s Hertha, accepted instead the metaphor of the tree. The Chain itself had faded as a controlling metaphorical concept, but its element of primacy for man, and connection of man to God remained and surely determined how the animal world was perceived. In terms accessible to poetry, and avoidable by few, Darwin destroyed the verbal opportunities of the chain and one’s sense of man’s importance in the order of nature. Darwin had an undesireable social effect as well when so-called ‘social Darwinism’ justified man’s ‘redness’ to other men presumed lower and supported a myth of progress which Eliot characterised as ‘a partial fallacy/ encouraged by superficial notions of evolution’ (The Dry Salvages, 11). On the other hand, socialists also accepted Darwinism, which they saw supporting their position in terms of competing societies rather than individuals – Socialist societies being predestined to outbid Capitalism because of their greater efficiency.’ Poems of Science, Eds John Heath-Stubbs, Phillips Salman, Penguin, 1984
How shall we say goodbye to God
How shall we say goodbye to God - as orphans become;
fold up the shining Heavens in a black embroidered bag,
and say such high beauty of the stars and Moon is trick -
illusion, born from the desperate dreaming hearts of men;
mere lumps of molten rock, ice, whose light is meaningless
and barren - Earth a floating chance, freakish ship in space,
which happened by this Sun and somehow burst with life -
from some bright seed, grown so slowly it was almost pain.
Are we not more near to Angels than a Fly? Are Apes,
Gorillas, Chimpanzees, more brother then, than these –
winged creatures drawn as honeybees around the throne,
of love and light. Can this loyal canine fellow at my knee
indeed be cousin? This cobalt bird more near to angel
than my own clipped blades - did I rise from child sea?
From earth crawl, instead of walk in glory fully formed
from God’s own perfect garden? Was not Eve deceived,
but bore she all our change and children - unto us -
adopted then by God, for I will not admit inventing
God; the words of Jesus do not contradict my mind -
and even now my troubled heart interprets meanings
of the story. I conceive one day new men might understand,
better how we came from earth and water - when God spat
upon the ground. All his creatures holy, still, in being one -
e’en how all life came teeming forth from Him - the Word.
‘Practically all the major poets, from Chaucer onwards, have, in some way, been concerned with the science of their day. When we come to the twentieth century, the picture is rather different. WB Yeats, perhaps the greatest poet of the first half of the twentieth century, attempted to excape both from historical and scientific ideas into an esoteric system of symbols. Although in other prose writings both TS Eliot and Ezra Pound evince considerable respect for science and scientific method, neither of them have much in their verse that can be said to relate to science. In ‘The Dry Salvages’, Eliot…condescends to science and almost seems to place scientific research on the same level as fortune-telling and table-turning. Some poets of a lesser, though considerable stature, such as WH Auden and William Empson, have a much greater grasp of science, have filled their poems with imagery drawn from sicience, and have handled scientific themes. Other poets experience admiration and wonder over science and scientists. Hugh McDiarmid, Marianne Moore, and AM Sullivan express their delight in science in poems that draw on its theories or its instruments. Eva Royston and Miroslav Holub celebrate the rigorous pleasures of working in a laboratory, one as a technician, the other as a research chemist. Louis MacNeice and David Ignatow construct pictures of scientists that stress the devotion to difficult symbolic work.’ Poems of Science, Eds John Heath-Stubbs, Phillips Salman, Penguin, 1984
‘…I saw/ Heroism, power for and practice of illimitable good emerge,/ Great practical imagination and God-like thoroughness,/ And mighty works of knowledge, tireless labours,/ Consummate skill, high magnamity, and undying Fame,/ A great campaign against unbroken servility,/ Ceaseless mediocrity and traditional immobility,/ To the end that European reason may sink back no more/ Into the immemorial embraces of the supernatural...’ Hugh MacDiarmid 1920-76, Two Scottish Boys
‘‘Don’t light the lamps!’ Marie [Curie] said in the darkness. Then she added with a little laugh: ‘Do you remember the day when you said to me; “I should like radium to have a beautiful colour?”… The reality was more entrancing than the simple wish of long ago. Radium had something better than ‘a beautiful colour’. It was spontaneously luminous. And in the sombre shed… phosphorescent bluish outlines gleamed, suspended in the night. ‘Look… look!’ the young woman murmured…Their two faces turned toward the pale glimmering, the mysterious sources of radiation, toward radium – their radium…Her body leaning forward, her head eager, Marie took up again the attitude which had been hers an hour earlier at the bedside of her sleeping child. Her companion’s hand lightly touched her hair. She was to remember for ever this evening of glow-worms, this magic.’ Eve Curie, Madame Curie, Heinemann, 1938
‘In philosophy, in fact, the idealist army won some well-deserved successes up to the end of the nineteenth century. Later, however, the fortunes of war went against it. Materialist troops seized the disputed territory and occupied it for most of the twentieth century, laying down assumptions that are still today the official creed of the Church Scientific (as TH Huxley called it).’ Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, Routeledge, 2003
‘The scientist disregards it because it [poetry] can't be reduced to mathematical equations and therefore seems to lack a principle." Robert Graves, Watch the Northwind Rise, Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 1949
‘From their writings [the successors of T.S. Eliot] you would be hard put to it to infer the simple historical fact that they are the contemporaries of Einstein and Heisenberg, of computers, electron microscopes, and the discovery of the molecular basis of heredity ... these have hardly found their way into modern poetry.... In the forty years which have elapsed since I first commented on the old subject matter of the new poetry, stonishingly few poems with a scientific reference have been written. Some elegant pieces of neo-metaphysical poetry by William Empson, Kenneth Rexroth's reflective lyric 'Lyell's Hypothesis Again' -- these are the only examples that come, off-hand, to my mind. There must, of course, be others -- but not many of them, I am sure. Of the better poems written since 1921, the great majority do not so much as hint at the most important fact of contemporary history -- the accelerating progress of science and technology…’ Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963
We have become as strangers, distrusting tribes
We have become as strangers, distrusting tribes;
even warring, but most often ignoring, sniping -
chewing over each other’s inadequacies, limitations,
species of ignorance; two world views dichotomised,
polarised, until such isolated populations even speak
different, strange languages; such is love gone wrong,
family strife - nothing is more bitter than unity broken,
continually ground, shattered - less able to be mended.
As the body of knowledge has grown - so heart and eyes
have moved yet further apart, until they think themselves
alien; so far apart to be irreconcilable, separate -
each blinded, silenced by its own environment,
like children who cannot play together - scrapping,
too small to take a big step back and see the whole.
Yeah, Science became the Goliath - gigantic force;
she ruled the roost, poetry often dissolving to frills
on the garment of thought, activity, real discovery;
until Goliath’s dance - alarming clumsy lumbering,
calls attention to his lack of balance, isolation
from the size of human beings; understanding,
society - seeing how a word, description, image
shuddering, can bring down a whole technology:
‘Frankenstein Foods’, ‘Mad Cow Disease’,
‘Human Clones’. How explanations matter;
how beauty they discover adhering to the bony facts
is wasted, lost, if no-one cares, nurturing this aspect.
How long to discover both were parts of a whole -
that vision must increase with more eyes, all valid
from different directions; focus, goals, understanding -
building balance, bigger pictures, a better knowledge;
so not uneasy bedfellows as the wandering bands
of both knew well - these peacemakers, travellers,
negotiators - entering each other’s worlds to parler -
debate, heal this needless chasm; special delegations
experimenting with different ways of finding truth -
harmonising, synthesising, where specialisation has
driven the teams apart, and poets can’t keep up -
and scientists are not multi-dimensional enough.
The century’s start calls with a new synthesised voice -
combining nature, religion, science, philosophy, poetry;
for not one alone has written adequately of the world
or times; not one capable alone - for the world is one.
And nowhere the multi-tasking nature of such endeavour,
concept more feminine than this dominant, domineering
‘masculine time’ that has seen its day and failed in war -
ecological destruction, division, murder, cruelty, hunger,
more obvious than the Human Genome - pulled slowly,
then faster, from unsealed darkness and such mysteries;
a magician’s string of hankerchiefs, rabbit from a hat -
undeniably gold-embroidered, interwoven with animals,
plants; every human being on the planet now, coming,
who ever lived - each secret more intriguing, synapse-
blowing than the last - monumental, symbolic, factual -
beautiful, staggering, present, revelatory, metaphysical;
chemical, literary, metaphorical; astounding, compelling,
gorgeous, implicative - precise/imprecise, shifting, new -
ancient, renewing, historical, synthetical, harmonic;
discordant, warring, melodic, disciplined, rag-bag -
ordered, chaotic, constructed, developing, evolved;
simple, complex, connected, individual, hording -
discarding, immaterial, material, mysterious, decoded -
matter, intention, potential, pattern, invisible, powerful.
All are one in this actual and symbolic description of being -
whose nature cries out for a comprehensive, holistic approach.
‘Cracking the human code has been a bit like painting a picture.’ BBC, 2004
Drawn to the Genome’s honey-pot
Drawn to the Genome’s generous, shapely honey-pot,
Aesthetics and Science are one - in buzzing, slavering,
drunken, sweet; scientists happily dribbling poetry -
poetry already creeping, foreign, limping, uncertain,
but welcome, appropriate, into their midst - same gold
reflected in her smiling face, licking her lips, smacking
at the shining prospect, sustenance of food for thought;
getting sticky, fat, burdened with ideas - obese dreams
bursting into words - flowers from the intellectual seed.
All humble workers are coming home; gilded, enriched
from their distant fields - exchanging pollen, rubbing -
Nature, however construed and powered, is queen again.
‘Until recently, strong objections have been raised against science. Robinson Jeffers and Robert Frost, for example, are, in their turn, angry or sarcastic about the claims and power of science. Jeffers several times reviles science for arrogance and carelessness in the face of what it produces…His speaker thinks that science, in prosecuting its hunt for knowledge, forgets humanity, imdulges its own mentality, and disowns responsibility for what it has discovered…It is possible to argue that Jeffers and those like him confuse pure science with applied science and that it is the application of scientific discoveries that need criticism and control. One can also argue, as some do, that because pure science takes place in a social context and because there is a scientific culture and mentality, science cannot consider itself ‘pure’ or ‘neutral’. In this view, the consequences of discoveries must always be considered. These and other poets of our century draw on the imagery and themes of science for poetic and philosophical purposes. Peter Staub’s ‘wolf of the Plains’ sees the movements of a wolf from inside the animal’s brain and as an instance of the genetic code determining bechaviour…’ Poems of Science, Eds John Heath-Stubbs, Phillips Salman, Penguin, 1984
Has Science a moral dimension
Has Science a moral dimension; does the power to clone
bear any responsibility for the act of cloning that ensues -
do planet-withering technologies in themselves count
as enemies of nature before they are applied, manifest.
Is technology to screen foeteses for imperfect genetics
tantamount to murder of children that might have been;
from desperately-disabled to blue-eyes rather than brown.
Can Science be held responsible for these faults of men -
because discovered by them, brought forth at his hand?
Are the great laws operating in the Universe absolute -
beyond the moral dimension - just are, morally neutral -
are all principles seen at work in the world and Universe
neutral, only carrying moral characteristics when applied;
manipulated by human schemes, any human intervention -
man’s morality like an infection, innoculation, vaccination,
where learning and history should bring wisdom - caution -
which brings Science back within the individual grasp.
The scientists who know, research - alone understand,
as ordinary men and thinkers of all other kinds become
alienated, estranged, ignorant, incapable - scientists are
in command, deciding on morality - when it is society
which should understand, discuss, decide; and not only
when dramas and colourful stories, scary scenarios erupt,
but always; referring to us, fellow citizens of planet Earth.
The mapping of the Human Genome became a battleground
of moral stance - driving polar ethics - wrestling for its soul,
nature which might become enslaved – the code’s very heart;
profit versus pure knowledge, cures, the big good of mankind.
And as they battled for the essence of ourselves,
we did not see and pin our colours to the mast -
but watched TV, a ghastly march of vapid celebrity;
warped replacement for our own forgotten friends –
pathetic obsession with ordinary mortals and their weight -
so orphaned from the world of thought, direction; aspiring
to be better, think – take joint responsibility and care;
evaluate and balance - decide on what is for the good.
And now the Genome is revealed, stands shining
like a goddess in her human shape; her creatures
printed, swirling round, her happy truths revealed;
her beauty saved on principles of freedom, access,
by scientists who took up necessary arms on our behalf -
word and campaign, struggle and toil; were good enough
to sublimate the ugly power of human greed - a financial
perspective; saving the Genome for our history, advance,
our healing future. She, the Genome, is Universal Man,
his print, as fabulous as anything dreamt of in the mind
of man or God; apotheosis of Creation, married to home,
Earth, our planet, wounded now among all the dead stars.
‘A feature of poems of science written since about 1945: the poets are living entirely within a scientific age. This might appear too obvious to mention; however, if we consider the poems we have already described, we see that many of them, in fact the most important of them, are responses to the growing power of science and yet that current critical theory seems to delimit poetry and to discharge attempts at any exended exposition in verse of scientific theory…Then, too, some scientists rely on the poets for words when they go outside their own sciences, as does Freema Dyson, whom in writing his autobiography, finds the language of science or sociology inadequate for his needs and explains he will use the language of poetry for human questions. And some scientists make their own metaphors. In The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas constructs a new cosmology. He compares the universe to a hierarchy of cells…Literary historians will be forgiven for thinking Thomas has invented a series of correspondences much like those in the Great Chain of Being; however, his unitary metaphor comes very close to doing just that. The scientists themselves give rise, therefore, to possibilities for poets. This fact and the poets’ acceptance of science, suggest a further interesting possibility. It is as if we had returned to the mentality of an earlier time when science was not antithetical to the poets but rather formed part of their world view and helped them write….Perhaps we are witnessing another age in which science and poetry are not antithetical but are mutually necessary knowledge.’ Poems of Science, Eds John Heath-Stubbs, Phillips Salman, Penguin, 1984
‘It was the song of doves begot the ear/ and not the ear that first conceived of sound…’ Richard Wilbur, Lamarck Elaborated, Things of This world, 1956
Throw open the gates of science
Throw open the gates of science -
we see are not surgical, cold steel,
after all, but golden, ornate, enwrought -
laden with fantastic interwoven symbols,
befitting such a fabulous old palace;
resplendent with statuory, gargoyles,
set in a maze that grows more and more
complex every year, yet is still pleasing,
exciting, though dangerous, so must
be trimmed, looked after - followed.
Creaking from stiff, rusty hinges - the gates
stuck open just a crack, so many years now;
let us laypeople - artists, poets - squeeze through;
yes, it’s an effort, but worth it, because we must.
Let us meet our expert guides, translators, teachers;
let them bear torches to show us the way, to explain
these difficult but beautiful terrains as best they can -
let us be welcomed, indulged; let us speak, question,
be thick, but get less ignorant; add in other kinds
of knowledge, debate. Let them - and us, conjure
bright metaphors as flares, other illuminating language.
Let us filter what they say and feed back. Let us enrich
the picture - joining in, contributing, challenging -
closing the opening distance, many slammed doors.
for the more of us there are - the looser,
wider, the great golden gates will swing.
As children now, Science and Poetry
As children now, Science and Poetry -
kneeling at the Human Genome’s feet,
come now, each must see how wrong
this war, alienation, division has been;
specialisation became a necessary strand
of Knowledge’s growing silver threads -
her gleaming, weaving fabric; the human mind,
though magically advanced, not yet capable of
holding every foreign tongue, new language
breaking out from journeys in all directions -
but validity of vision is not Science’s alone;
as beauty is not Poetry’s alone - exclusively
her sole domain; and neither is the truth alone,
but represent an aspect of the glimpsed whole.
Call truce and reconciliation then; a scientist already
asks the Genome be enshrined as ‘living monument’,
as public monument; like the Angel of the North
draws so much to her metal wings - magnetising
ideas and pride, enfolding when no-one’s looking;
this stumbling into poetry of a scientific language
is shrieking evidence of common culture;
possibility of creative, crazy exchange –
a synthesised approach to this fantastic work;
on unimaginable scale, this shifting Genome
sculpture, shape of netted lights; her twinkling is
the constantly dancing nature of happening life –
she is marvellous, living chemistry – distillation -
fabulous script; belonging to no-one, entirely free,
just as intended. She will not be encompassed
by a single vision - described by one language.
Fashionable Language
It is contemporary scientists who feel comfortable
with the word miracle, bandying about such terms,
like wonder, mysterious energy, fantastic patterns;
and poets now afraid even to mention these words,
such literary sacrilege - passé like wearing frockcoats -
britches, bonnets; recognising the poor abandoned soul.
Dead People’s Rings
It is not literally true that a gold ring
holds something of a dead person -
a kind of printing in the atoms;
has a small halo, like a candle
you can almost see, slight stellar glow;
but the space encircled within the gold
is different, nevertheless, to all other space -
for here they were; their blood passing through
for a lifetime, and no precise chemical analysis
will find them lurking, molecules in the shine -
no skin or cells still cling to polished metal;
if you rub they will not appear like a genie,
never be reconstituted from any lingering DNA,
like dinosaur or Dodo; sing like a wine glass lip
at your wistful touch - their voice, though still
familiar, resonating low and sweet as an angel.
Yet how precious is this ring - grown special -
sacred, like a church’s ordinary stone becomes
imbued over centuries with holiness you can feel –
somehow, yet, they linger there, are closer, warmer;
this object marked, inhabited always in the world –
even strangers’ jewellery in an antique store keeps
something of this physical and spiritual patina –
and though the instrument is not yet discovered
which can measure this, it is clear to everyone
that it exists - people bidding high at auction
for even common possessions of the dead –
Marilyn Monroe’s hairbrush with her static;
Elvis’s guitar with his electric handprint –
and the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci
or Keats, Shakespeare, glowing with something
we could not paint but in imagination - violins
we hold our ear to, to hear the past master of music,
as the shell has the sound of the sea imprinted, held.
Always we will wear the gold of dead loved ones -
I constantly touch my unknown grandmother’s ring
on my little finger, to receive some charge
I cannot define – no current yet researched.
Poets’ Genome
The shivering, exposed Genome of all poets
must come in part from all previous poets -
stitched through history, silver and gold
entwined; loose threads, jewels, cultured
pretension, dazzling truths - geneology
of musical bone; a beauty gene passed
like virus, fever, baton - often dropped;
wearing Emperor’s discordant clothes -
music washed from tongue and ear,
shed for plain sister cleverness, wit;
ugly cousin obscurity - snobbish heritage,
social climbing - excluding, vain, opaque
elitism - adventurous language, bold steps;
profound illumination, guidance, humility.
Wat molecules swim among the chemicals,
what colour or form - fused with a musical
nature; what patterns wired for such diversities –
plasticity of habitation, Kirlian touch, X-ray eye;
but using the same words, as moulding tools;
creating form - however broken, convoluted,
made anew - for there can be no poem without
words, except those written by no human hand;
the act of a flower being a flower, of stars shining
in a winter night, an entirely novel child authored
from dreaming darkness somewhere unknown;
whatever that elusive light shining in the eye –
and a poet washed to a desert island as an infant
would feel coagulation of something in his mind
as he witnessed the sea, and his heart the red flowers
burning against a blue sky - even with no vocabulary.
‘The possibility bears on a futher difficult question: what kind of knowledge is poetry? Moderns have perhaps been trained to believe that the only certain knowledge is quantative knowledge. We have been raised on the notion that reality is defined by science. The nature of poetic truth comes home to us when we see what poems of science try to do. Generally, poetry cannot accomodate scientific truths in quantative form. On or two poets have tried to do so but have failed. The poems are opaque to one who is not a specialist…The best judge of the success of one of those poems is the literate scientist. The poem of science that directly incorporates quantitative or formulaic scientific material has to remain an aloof sub-genre within the larger genre…unless scientific material becomes more like ‘common knowledge’… It may appear after all that poetry and science are not so far apart as has often been thought.’ Poems of Science, Eds John Heath-Stubbs, Phillips Salman, Penguin, 1984
‘Yet we, who are borne on one dark grain of dust/ Around one indistinguishable spark/ of atar-mist, lost in one lost feather of light,/ Can by strength of our own thought, ascent/ through universe after universe…’ Alfred Noyes, The Torch-Bearers, 1937
‘There is no light or colour as a fact in external nature. There is merely motion of material…The mind, in apprehending, experiences sensations which, properly speaking, are qualities of the mind alone…Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent; the nightingale for his song; and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves.’ Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1926
‘I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’ Sir Isaac Newton, Quoted in Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, Sir David Brewster, 1855
‘Early in the twentieth century, then, serious supporters of the reductive project turned from imperialistic conquest to isolationism. Rather than try to turn history, poetry, ethics and the rest into parts of science, they worked to restore scientific purity by shutting these strangers out…This illusion of [science’s] omnipotence is strongly encouraged by today’s academic specialisation’…Historically, today’s over-exaltation of science originated as a response to the equally absurd over-exaltation of classical studies that ruled in the nineteenth century…This idea of a war between two cultures is a futile one. Instead we need to sit down together and exchange our visions.’ Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, Routeledge, 2003
Poetry & Science: Weird Sisters
Poetry and science should never have been apart -
being some kind of weird sisters, twisted relatives;
close kin in love of metaphor, simile, easily moving
into the abstruse, symbolic, metaphysical, mystical -
mysterious; making connections, mapping, looking
for answers, finding the beautiful - truth as viewed
from different angles, like a sculpture never seen
whole - portrait face hiding a weird back-of-head;
both gnomes on sucking ground - looking up
at effortless space, star laws, atomic dwarves,
exotic, unlikely, rare as fairies in the known Universe;
organic anomaly, complex Evolution fruit - perplexed
by the problem of the holy voice that seems not to be
homed in chemical cell, bone-hooded brain, pumping
heart, dramatic blood; called by one, ‘consciousness’,
the other ‘soul’, ‘spirit’ - at least ‘til poetry reasoned
herself into embarrassment, surrendered such golden terms,
glowing shorthand, currency with the people, common ear,
bright muscle; her wondering, wandering about stars, God.
How science has stealthily claimed such magic for herself,
wearing now the sparkling wizard’s cloak, magician’s wand,
while poetry, stumbling about her proud, dark, secret house,
knocks her shins, painfully, against personal obsessions,
concerns, feelings of individual mouths, particular cares,
specifity; while mankind just marches on, lonely, staggering
behind piper science calling the tune - poetry lagging further
yet further behind, caught in dragging mires of self obsession -
trivia, pomp, pretension; building fences with a mesh of words
whose meaning is obscure - might as well not be there for all
the reader knows; setting books aside, frustrated, watches TV.
While science grew up into a brilliant, awkward loner; weird kid
with no social circle - socially clumsy, inarticulate with strangers,
preferring his own company - which made people think him plain -
unimaginative, boring, maybe even dangerous; like all things apart,
misunderstood - like poetry, hiding her light in obscurity,
shining only for personal disciples; thinking herself more
sophisticated, but ignored, isolated. Science thinking itself better,
infinitely wiser, blowing down ignorance, blasting myth, religion,
then finding them standing yet in their skeletons, ancient raiment,
legendary skin - plucked and picked like chickens - but still there.
Will they hold hands then, once again - recognise each other,
these weird sisters; now science strays into the greater, wider,
deeper world, and must explain itself, draw pictures, poems,
must make us understand such themes - shining discoveries
as these; milestones with major moral implications, aesthetic
and scientific templates - communal score for all Creation -
now poetry has bored itself into obscurity, self obsession;
dozes while the bones of life are stripped before its eyes -
tinkering while knowledge burns – scientists, politicians it is,
talking of God’s Word made manifest by science, four letters;
of biology’s Holy Grail - manual and script, secret of life itself -
our communion with everything alive; God’s very handwriting
manifesting coded flesh. Will they refuse to cooperate - when both
are needed now; will poetry leave it to those thought least equipped
by viciously divisive culture; rareified, purified, sterile language -
those not romantic, feeling enough, to spell out what these letters
of the Human Genome mean; when even they reach for poetry,
not knowing how to reach the sofa’d population - dangerously
snoozing; unblissfully unaware, slumbering needlessly -
abandoned by science and poetry both; barely wondering. ](Brief_romp_through_%28contd.%29_files/shapeimage_3.png)
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